While a large part of the world's population faces the problems of underdiagnosis and undertreatment, it is apparent that a “modern epidemic” of overdiagnosis afflicts high-income countries, with tangible human and financial costs of the unnecessary management of overdiagnosed diseases. While there is ongoing debate about how to best describe the problem, narrowly defined, overdiagnosis occurs when increasingly sensitive tests identify abnormalities that are indolent, non-progressive, or regressive and that, if left untreated, will not cause symptoms or shorten an individual's life.

This article published in 17 June 2014 edition of the journal PLos Medicine outlines why pediatric cancer should now be considered a global child health priority, describes the need for national childhood cancer strategies (NCCS), and highlights necessary policy components to reduce LMIC pediatric cancer mortality rates.

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In a double-blind randomized controlled trial, Xavier Saez-Llorens and colleagues examine the vaccine efficacy of PHiD-CV against community-acquired pneumonia in young children in Panama, Argentina, and Colombia.

Joshua Mendelsohn and colleagues discuss the moral, legal, and public health principles and recent evidence that strongly suggest that refugees and internally displaced people should have equal access to HIV treatment and support as host nationals and give detailed recommendations for refugees and internally displaced people accessing antiretroviral therapy in stable settings.

Taking a malaria control program from the control phases through to elimination is challenging. The reorientation of the malaria control program involves a shift of focus, from reaching high levels of coverage of interventions to prevent morbidity and mortality, to an emphasis on completeness and timeliness of activities in order to seek out infections and interrupt transmission. The need to communicate this change in strategic thinking to large, cumbersome health systems has proven a challenge. Has China found a solution?

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is the only internationally binding public health treaty ever adopted under the World Health Organization's (WHO) constitution. Although an FCTC signatory, the US joins Cuba, Argentina, and a handful of other countries as one of the few signatories yet to ratify the treaty. With 176 ratifying countries and the European Union, FCTC has demonstrated global acceptance and progress on efforts to combat tobacco use in an effort to reduce the eight million tobacco-related deaths projected to occur annually by 2030.

Robert Bain and colleagues conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess whether water from "€œimproved" sources is less likely to contain fecal contamination than "unimproved" sources and find that access to an "€œimproved source"€ provides a measure of sanitary protection but does not ensure water is free of fecal contamination.

Yellow fever is a flavivirus infection that is transmitted to people and to non-human primates through the bites of infected mosquitoes. This serious viral disease affects people living in and visiting tropical regions of Africa and Central and South America. In rural areas next to forests, the virus typically causes sporadic cases or even small-scale epidemics (outbreaks) but, if it is introduced into urban areas, it can cause large explosive epidemics that are hard to control.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is making the clinical management of infections such as gonorrhoea increasingly difficult worldwide. In between the discovery of penicillin and the emergence of multidrug resistant (MDR-NG) and extensively drug resistant (XDR-NG) strains, gonorrhoea was considered unpleasant, but not particularly serious, because it was easily treated. Experts increasingly describe N.

Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) has been proposed in high-income countries to reduce obesity and type 2 diabetes. We sought to estimate the potential health effects of such a fiscal strategy in the middle-income country of India, where there is heterogeneity in SSB consumption, patterns of substitution between SSBs and other beverages after tax increases, and vast differences in chronic disease risk within the population.

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